Thomas Mcguane - Nobody's Angel

Did Tio in fact smell a rat, or only a quail? Was Patrick the Montana version of the Tulsa hidey-hole, where ole Shit proved bulletproof? He felt ashamed of having had this thought. Shamed and chilled. Himself as part of a test of sexual allegiance. Maybe he meant to out-Tio Tio, to get just hopelessly Western about this situation, this fix, to see who, just who , was the standup gunslinger of the two. It is typical of me, he thought, to foresee a major showdown well before an acquaintanceship has been struck between the principals. Am I not rude? I am.

He hadn’t been rude yet, but he would have to cut back on his drinking or it was going to all burst forth in a clenched and dangerous teetering toward love, requited or otherwise. This was the sort of isolated dam break that Patrick was susceptible to. When he could identify it, he thought it was ridiculous. He didn’t see anything now at all and he was therefore wide open to any repetitious mistake, precisely at a time in his life when he could least stand repetition. But then, where was the repetition; and couldn’t this just be a fear, as guilt is a fear, of something that didn’t exist?

He drifted away. One of the first lines he ever learned from a song was, “I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.” He was hitchhiking from Two Dot and he heard it in the back seat of a hot-rod Ford. He had never seen a two-dollar bill. Up front an older boy necked with his girl. Patrick could smell something … well, something. He had not imagined that there would be anything to smell. He tried not to stare or draw breath through his nose. Breath through his nose, he knew, would be a mortal sin. He looked instead at the sagebrush flats and streaks of water running from spring-flooded culverts in the creek bottoms.

“How far you going?”

“What?” Seal off that nose, she’s wriggling.

“Where you getting off at?”

“Deadrock.”

“We ain’t going to Deadrock. I’m shutting down this side of Harlowton— You ever seen a rubber?”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t. He was mouth-breathing and gaping into the sagebrush.

“Ever seen one like this?” It was a Ted Williams brand and it had the ball player on the label, ready to pound one out of Fenway Park.

“No, I sure haven’t.”

“Came out of a machine,” said the girl. “In Great Falls because of the air base. It’s a year and a half old. It’s give out and it’s still in the wrapper. That’s about how I was raised, buddy.”

“Up around them bases,” said the driver, “a rubber don’t have a long life to look forward to.”

“It does in Harlowton,” said the girl doggedly.

“I ought to rape your ass!”

“You and what army?”

The driver went into the hot-rod slump, left hand fingering the wind vane, upper body wedged between the wheel and the door. It worked; she crawled on over and Patrick craned at the landscape, wondering if this was going to end up in confession, then finally filling his lungs with the immemorial musk that fogged the interior of that hot-rod Ford, thinking: Purgatory at the very least.

He would have to go back to that, just to find one level of the power Claire had come to have for him. At the very minimum she was the lost ghost of the gold dredge.

TODAY WAS GOING TO REQUIRE A DEPARTURE, A MIGHTY DEPARTURE, from the recent pattern of thinking, drinking, funeral attending, cooking, baby-sitting his grandfather, caning editors and tampering with love. Because the ranch was falling apart. It was somehow terrific to rediscover that the ranch was not a dead, immutable thing. He could see from the upper road where one headgate had washed out, and there was a great mean scar where the water had gouged at the pretty hillside, and the topsoil from that particular part of the ranch was now in the Yellowstone River on its way to North Dakota. That had to be fixed. There were four places where the wire was down on the west-division fence; that would have to be pulled up and restapled. Things were a mess and he was getting excited. He was going to need his fence stretcher and fencing gloves and it was still going to be tops in mindless. But if he had any luck at all, this was going to last for years. It was like the heart trouble he wished for and never got.

He started hurting about halfway through the day. He hauled salt and mineral blocks, ponying a second horse up to the forest line. Then gathered thirty black yearlings from the brush along the creek where the flies had driven them from their feed. He gathered them into one end of the corral and he penned them off with a steel panel. He hung the heavy spray canister from a canvas strap over the sore muscles of his shoulders and waded among the fly-swarming backs, pumping with one hand and directing the nozzled wand with the other. When he was nearly done, one white-eyed steer flicked out a rear hoof and kneecapped Patrick, and he had to go sit down until the pain subsided and the knee swelled up tight within his jeans. He sat on the dirt of the corral, the canister still in place, tapped one dirty boot with the spray wand, looked through the steel panel at the milling steers as they felt the flies’ liftoff; like them, he rolled fool eyes to heaven and thought: Claire, my knee hurts.

He hung the sprayer on a corral post and rode back down to the ranch. He was so tired that when he unsaddled the horse, he just drop-kicked the saddle out of his way and threw the bridle in a heap. He grained the horse and kept her down for the next day and went inside.

Then, while he was making dinner for his grandfather, who was sorting a shoe box of assorted cartridges, he noticed through the kitchen window that everything was covered with a thin layer of dust.

“Did the wind blow real hard here today?”

“No.”

“How come everything is covered with dust?”

“A helicopter landed in the yard.”

“What?”

“Helicopter.”

“Who was in it?”

“Nobody got out. Here’s an old Army Springfield round.”

“How long did it stay there?”

“Oh, bout an hour. Made quite a racket. They never shut that big propeller off. I really didn’t want to walk near it.” Tio had made an aerial visit under power and Patrick had missed it: a lost effect, like rabbits jumping from a top hat in an empty room.

Patrick had given up on his cooking since his grandfather had gone off his specialties. So now he made dopy chicken casseroles or things he could cook all day in a crock; and today he had prepared, of all things, a big bowl of red Jell-O to set beside the aerosol can of Reddi-Wip; and it was in its tremulous surface that he first detected the return of the helicopter, a faint sound, a drumming, like one’s pulse; then rapidly magnifying as it moved toward them. Its horizontal motion could be felt to stop, and high above the house the waves of sound centered.

Patrick walked out the front door and could see the great insect shape high above the ranch. It made him nervous. The moment he stepped into the yard, the helicopter began to move toward the mountains, disappearing finally through a narrow pass. Patrick went back inside and thumbed open The Joy of Cooking.

“I wish that movie hadn’t gone away,” said his grandfather. “Maybe there was movie people in that helicopter.”

“I doubt it.”

“They could have been scouting locations.”

“I suppose.”

“Everybody loves a Western.”

“How do you know it was a Western?”

“ Hondo’s Last Move ? What else could it be?”

“The word around here was it was about a child molester named Hondo.”

“I didn’t know that. God, I didn’t know that. ”

“Can you eat chicken and dumplings again?”